Should Christians Care about Beauty?
Introduction
This Sunday, I preached on the second commandment. Below are some thoughts that didn’t make it to the sermon, but I still thought was worth considering. I kind of buried the lead in this article, so I’ll say at the beginning what I tried to do. Those of you patient enough to read through the whole thing can judge whether I accomplished this or not. Here it is: Christians should defend beauty as well as facts and morality. Christians should love truth, goodness, and beauty. This isn’t an argument telling you what is beautiful and what isn’t. Instead, this is an argument for you to begin thinking about beauty. Since you gotta begin somewhere; how about you begin right where you are?
Strip-mall Churches and a Holy God.
Imagine worshipping with your church in a beautiful cathedral with stained glass, candles flickering in the background, beautiful handmade furniture. Everyone is worshipping God, not the beautiful surroundings. They bow in prayer, but not to an image. They sing and raise their hands, not to a handcrafted object, but to the invisible God who is there with them.
Although God prohibited bowing or venerating images in worship, He allows and even commanded images alongside worship. God commanded Israel to build cherubim on the ark, which is an image of a heavenly being (Ex 25:18). He commanded build the lampstand in the Holy Place into an almond tree (Ex 25:33), which in an image of an earthly thing. Despite the beauty of the temple, the priests were not to bow to the beautiful things as holy things in their worship. The priests were commanded to obey the second commandment in the midst of beautiful images and symbols.
Christians need to worship with their hearts toward heaven. However, we should also seek to worship from the kingdom of heaven here on earth. Heavenly worship is beautiful worship. If given the choice between worshipping in an abandoned warehouse or a stunning chapel, we should be the kind of people who choose the chapel every time. We should want beautiful architecture and furnishings because we want our worship to be beautiful. When God instructs His people to build Him a place for worship, He commands that it be done skillfully (Ex 31:1-11; 35:30-36:5). God didn’t tell Moses to find the nearest abandoned building and meet there for worship. Christians in American can choose (for now) whether their buildings look like a magnificent piece of art or like a concert venue. Why do most of us choose the concert venue?
Books have been written answering that question. But my simple explanation is that we’re suckers. We’ve been lied to. We’ve swallowed deception hook, line, and sinker, and plopped ourselves right on the fisherman’s lap. What is the lie? What is the deception? What has been pulled over on us? The lie that we’ve believed that causes us to choose neon McDonald’s signs over hand crafted artwork is that it doesn’t really matter.
We’ve decided the only thing that really matters is where we go when we die. Now, some of us may say it differently. “I’ve got Jesus in my heart.” “I’ve decided to follow Jesus.” “I’ve got a relationship with God.” Now, all these statements are good and right. It’s good that you have Jesus in your heart. But is that it? Is Jesus simply the Lord of your heart? It’s good that God has a relationship with you, but does He have a relationship with your wallet, your time, and your phone screen? It’s great that you follow Jesus, but does your closet look like a closet of someone who follows Jesus? Call me crazy, but shouldn’t the people who worship a holy God, also look holy (1 Peter 1:16)? And since you’ve already called me crazy, let me go full cuckoo and ask shouldn’t churches who worship a holy God want their building to look holy?
Truth, Goodness, and (maybe) Beauty
Although choices begin in the heart, they never stay there. The choice to eat a box of Little Debbie snacks every day begins inside a man, but that choice eventually looks like something outside the man. Modern people tend to separate what something looks like on the outside from a choice made on the inside. “We can’t judge if it’s right or wrong to eat Little Debbies, so we also can’t tell Frank that he looks like he’s gained thirty pounds.” Ancient Christians, on the other hand, noticed that choices, facts, and aesthetics were inescapably related, which is why they called them transcendentals.
The three transcendentals are truth, goodness, and beauty. They correspond with the four branches of philosophy: metaphysics and epistemology (truth), ethics (goodness), and beauty (aesthetics). Here’s my point: Christians should defend beauty with the same zeal we defend truth and goodness. We should fight for beautiful church buildings along with our fight for biblical preaching and true worship. We should pursue modest and beautiful attire along with pursuing peace, love, and mercy.
We Live in 1984
George Orwell, in 1984, describes a dystopian world where a total state, Big Brother, rules the population with an iron fist. Pop culture, when referencing the book, focuses on the surveillance capability of Big Brother. But just as important is Orwell’s description of the population’s wardrobe—they all wear the same style of shabby overalls. Human beings are no longer dignified by wearing uniforms specific to their holy occupation. In a world dominated by the spirit of the age, men are merely cogs in a machine. Orwell’s novel is no longer fiction. We now live in 1984. Go to the Walmart or the grocery store and you’ll find people dressed in their pajama’s. But here’s the real kicker: we don’t care. Christians, who bear God’s name on them through baptism, intentionally dress like everyone else.
In my twenties, I went through a phase where I didn’t care how I dressed or what I looked like. I’ve never really cared about my attire, but when I was in my early twenties, I didn’t care at all. I remember needing to drive to store to pick up some cereal and milk. So, I grabbed the first pieces of clothing from my dirty pile of clothes and drove to the store. It wasn’t until I got back home that I realized my shirt had a big hole in the back. It still doesn’t bother me that I went out in public like that. But now I realize that is a deficiency in me. It’s bad, as in not morally good, for me to be unaffected looking like a slob. I now understand what my grandparents and parents tried to teach me. “Walk out the front door like you respect yourself.” Today, most of us walk out the front door like we worship ourselves. We worship our comfort, so we dress in pajamas. Women worship attention, so they wear yoga pants and a crop top. Men worship convenience, so they dress like hobos who sometimes go to the gym. You look like what you worship.
Concluding Thoughts for the Patient
C.S. Lewis saw the world we live in now more than fifty years ago. In his That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, he connects moral decay with aesthetic decay. Once you convince a man that his feelings about beauty constitute beauty, you can convince him that evil is good, and good is evil. Modernity has convinced everyone that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that our feelings about the Grand Canyon make it a beautiful landscape. Now, post-modernity has convinced everyone that Jake is now Sally, and you are evil for noticing Sally’s five o’clock shadow. Every debate is now leveled to the realm of personal opinion. You worship Jesus because you believe he is God, but your grandson believes he’s a girl. Who are we to judge? And that’s exactly my point, who are we to judge? Jesus is the Lord, savior, and judge of everything. That means He has opinions about our science experiments, our laws, and our art. To be a Christian means to be little Christs. So, how about we try to form our little opinions about beauty around His glorious opinions about beauty? It all starts with admitting that we need to start right where we are.